The Spy Who Loved Money
Thümmel, pictured with an unknown female, spied for sizable sums of cash
He was a close friend of Himmler, who played practical jokes on the Gestapo while spying for the Czechs. The story of Abwehr Captain Paul Thümmel, as featured in my book Operation Second Chance, has to be one of the strangest to emerge from the intelligence annals of the Second World War.
Thümmel was born in the eastern German town of Neuhausen, close to the Czech border. He was an early convert to Nazism, forming the first party branch in his hometown and gaining membership number 61,574, which later entitled him to a golden badge given to the first 100,000 party recruits.
Thümmel was also friendly with Himmler, who managed to land him a job in the Abwehr in Dresden. Thümmel rewarded his old friend by contacting the Czechs offering to provide information on German spies within their borders for money.
So began a profitable relationship for both sides, where Thümmel, aka Agent A-54, supplied details of Hitler's plans to invade Czechoslovakia, Poland and Holland and the postponement of Operation Sealion.
However, things began to unravel when the Gestapo captured a Czech resistance radio transmitter and coded information about an agent named Rene and Franta.
They got worse when SD Major Walther Schellenberg - yes, him - searched the British embassy following the bombing of Belgrade in April 1941 and found an intact telegram from a 'Franz Josef' in its safe warning of the impending bombardment.
Schellenberg triangulated the information and discovered it could have only come from three people based in Prague: Thümmel and two SS men.
Prague Gestapo Kriminalsekretär ‘Wild Willi’ Abendschön eventually brought Thümmel down
But unmasking Thümmel - who SD chief Reinhard Heydrich had come to call Traitor X - would not be easy. For one thing, he was protected by both Heydrich's boss, Himmler, and Abwehr chief Wilhelm Canaris.
When Heydrich eventually ordered his arrest in October 1941 after months of investigations, both Himmler and Canaris orchestrated a storm of protest with Hitler and had him released.
Thümmel insisted he was trying to infiltrate the Czech resistance group named the Three Kings and promised to work with the Gestapo officer hunting them, 'Wild Willi' Abendschön.
Instead, he sent Abendschon on endless wild goose chases. On one occasion, he gave the Gestapo man an address where he claimed the Three Kings were staying. When Abendschön raided it, he found two wastepaper baskets labelled Goebbels and Göring.
However, Thümmel's charmed life couldn't last. In March 1942, Abendschön forced Thümmel to lure the leader of the Three Kings, Vaclav Moravek, to a Prague park, where Moravek shot himself to avoid capture.
The following day, Thümmel was arrested and sent to the notorious Pankrac prison, where he remained for the next two years. Towards the end of the war, he was moved to Theresienstadt concentration camp under the name Petr Tooman. He was murdered by an SS guard there in 1945, just days before the end of the war.
Abendschön was executed by the Soviets for war crimes in 1946.
